thallia
Ubuntu 18.04 : Upgrades, install scripts, and more
Today I ran lsb_release -a on my laptop and tower, and to my astonishment I was very behind on the upgrades.
My laptop was running Ubuntu 17.10, and my tower was running 16.04. Jeez.
Since 17.10 was the newest Ubuntu using GNOME instead of Unity, I was able to upgrade from the command line to the 18.04 version. Before that, I backed up both of my computers to be safe.
I ran all these:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt autoremove
sudo do-release-upgrade
Ubuntu will ask you a few questions and then download everything. After a reboot, my laptop worked like a charm!
My tower was another story, however. I ran that same list of commands, but it didn’t recognize that 18.04 or 17.10 were available to upgrade to, so I ended up just doing a clean install of Ubuntu 18.04, then running Gector’s cool new install script for new systems. I plan on writing a script similar to it, with my configurations and most-used software of course.
Once I clean installed, I had to use xrandr to let the computer know that my monitors are stacked on top of each other. As I tried xrandr --output DVI-D-1 --above HDMI-1 my entire screen froze, and the bottom monitor shut off.
Super weird.
I realized that my GTX 1050TI drivers weren’t installed on this clean install, so I figured that was the next place to go.
Running ubuntu-drivers devices listed my graphics card and the recommended driver that went with it. Then I executed sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall and let it install all the drivers I needed.
After a reboot, I went to arandr this time and created my screen configuration, and boom! It worked :D
The next steps are to go through the main configurations I have for tmux, vim, i3, polybar, and fish, then make copies of those configurations and edit them for my tower computer. You can see my collection of configurations here: https://gitlab.com/thallia/dotconfig
After figuring out all the configurations, I wrote a bash new_install.sh script, which you can find in my dotconfig repository linked above. This installs all the general programs I use and configures the new system to my keybindings, vim config, and tmux keybindings so everything can be used like normal. That way every time I have a new system, I don’t have to spend an hour re-configuring it to my preferences.
To test the script, I installed VirtualBox, a virtual machine software for linux, Mac, and windows.
Once installing the .deb package with sudo dpkg -i /path/to/virtualbox/file.deb, I launched the software and answered the basic questions for making a virtual machine. Then it asked for an optical drive, in which I had no clue what to give it.
Apparently an optical drive is either a bootable USB with the operating system on it, or a .iso image file with the operating system. So I went and downloaded Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver.
When I tried loading the vm again, it gave me this error:
this kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detects an i686 CPU, unable to boot
That made me grumpy. But I sucked it up and went to stackoverflow and found that if you set your virtual machine to 2GB of disk space (which I did), you can’t support the 64-bit versions. So clearly the way to go was download the Ubuntu 16.04 (32-bit) version of linux. If that doesn’t work, might as well try to change the settings.
While waiting for the ubuntu torrent to download, I searched around and attempted this solution, but stack overflow said if that one still doesn’t work then my hardware doesn’t support it. tears
Wow. So I tried the new 32-bit version, and a critical system failure occured. Great. Then I remembered my mac laptop: which happens to gloriously work with everything!
I set up virtualbox on linux there, all the same settings, loaded the .iso, and boom. Ubuntu 18.04 (64-bit) worked wonderfully. Aside from the fact that it seemed to freeze. Sometimes that can happen if you don’t give the vm enough space, so I edited some of the storage settings and rebooted the virtual machine.
That fixed the freezing :) I went to my gitlab, downloaded my new install script, and ran it.
So many errors :(
But that’s cool! I did pretty well for scripting the whole thing. I just got some package names wrong, so I went and looked them up, fixed them, pushed to gitlab, and tried again.
After debugging for a few, it finally worked! There are two things still left to debug, installing rofi manually and debugging why the script won’t cd into a YCM directory.
Other than that, I’d say this project was successful.
Until next time! :D
{thallia}